April 26, 2026 - "I'm not a rapist", Trump tells CBS 60 Minutes in response to WHCD suspect's 'manifesto'

This is LBC with Nick Abbott, and this is Simon Marx, LBC's Washington correspondent.

Hello, Simon.

Evening Nick.

So quite the day.

It was sort of ironic that Trump did not attend the White House correspondence dinner before

because of the reception he thought he'd get.

And now this?

Yes, absolutely.

Ironic indeed.

He's now, of course, pressing for the dinner to take place to be rescheduled.

He says within the next month, within the next 30 days, I have to tell you that the president

has given an interview tonight to 60 minutes, the flagship current affairs program on CBS,

a network that is generally now increasingly friendly to him, but he has engaged in a very

difficult exchange on 60 minutes with Nora O'Donnell, the former anchor of the CBS evening

news.

She has read to him a portion of the alleged gunman's 1000-word manifesto that was sent again

reportedly by the suspect to members of his own family minutes before the attempt to breach

security at the Hilton Hotel 24 hours ago.

That was all taking place, of course, on the ground floor of the Hilton Hotel.

That's where the security was set up.

The president was enjoying his salad course along with 2,000 invited guests in the basement

ballroom.

The gunman, of course, was tackled on the first floor, never got close to the basement

ballroom.

But take a listen to this simply astonishing exchange between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News

and President Donald Trump on 60 minutes tonight.

The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President.

He appears to reference a motive in it.

He writes this quote, administration officials, they are targets.

And he also wrote this, I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile rapist and traitor to

coat my hands with his crimes.

What's your reaction to that?

Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you're your

horrible people.

Horrible people.

Yeah, he did write that.

I'm not a rapist.

I didn't rape anybody.

Oh, you think he was referring to you?

Excuse me.

I'm not a pedophile.

You read that crap from some sick person.

I got associated with all the stuff that has nothing to do with me.

I was totally exonerated.

Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let's

say, Epstein or other things.

But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably, I read the

manifesto.

You know, it's a sick person.

But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I'm not any of those things.

Staggering exchange there on 60 minutes tonight between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News and President

Trump in which he denies the claims made in the manifesto by this alleged suspect.

The suspect doesn't name him in the manifesto.

That's why you heard Nora O'Donnell there saying to him, oh, you think he's referring

to you?

And then the president denies that he is a rapist, has ever been a pedophile, insists

once again that it was, as he puts it in that exchange, friends of Nora O'Donnell by

which he means the people and the Democratic Party, prominent Democrats, people on the left

that were associated with Jeffrey Epstein, not him.

And that exchange, I think, is going to be dominating headlines here tomorrow morning.

It literally aired within the last few minutes on CBS.

On CNN, meanwhile, they had the Democrat Jamie Raskin in for an interview and the host

on CNN blamed Jamie Raskin for previously saying that Trump is bad for the country for

this attack.

Utterly extraordinary and utterly extraordinary question posed to Congressman Jamie Raskin

Democrat from Maryland by Dana Bash of CNN asking him, in essence, whether the Democrats

are now going to cool it with their attacks on President Donald Trump and intimating through

the question that Democrats in some sense may have been responsible for this attempt to

breach security at the Hilton Hotel last night.

I mean, again, look, this entire weekend and I don't take this view because Donald

Trump is president.

I have taken this view for over 20 years in this city.

This White House correspondence dinner every year is just the most appalling example of

media organizations choosing to cozy up casually and establish friendly relationships with the

people in power that they cover.

And it's one of the reasons why I never attend any of these dinners.

I stopped attending these dinners years ago because I just felt that this was an

increasingly uncomfortable place to be.

We should not as reporters be casually socializing with the newsmakers that we cover on a daily

basis.

But we've now got to a stage where the news media pinned down as they were in the ballroom

briefly last night and let's be clear it was brief because the government didn't get

anywhere near the ballroom itself.

He didn't even get down to the basement level of the hotel.

Huge questions as we've been talking about earlier in the day on LBC about the nature

of the security operation that was put into place at that hotel last night.

There's going to be a big investigation into that.

But now you have the news media that was present in the room for that dinner and President

Trump and his top officials kind of fused together by the traumatic experience that they

went through last night.

And the result of that was the extraordinary moment today on CNN where a Democrat member

of Congress who himself was at the dinner last night and went back into the room saying

the show must go on just as President Trump had been doing before, of course, they canceled

it on the advice of law enforcement is basically challenged by CNN and asked whether he's going

to continue vocally opposing the actions of the Trump administration because in some sense

the anchor woman was suggesting that perhaps the Democrats had fueled all of this, which

just takes the relationship between the media and the politicians they cover to an entirely

new low, which is another reason why no self-respecting reporter should be going to these events.

Yes, I mean, apart from anything else, it's the price of the ticket to sit there and eat,

isn't it?

I mean, they presumably are not paying for themselves in large numbers, I would imagine,

they are being paid for by friendly corporations to the president.

Well, I think it's $300 a ticket now and increasingly, of course, the reporter's ticket

price is covered by the networks that they work for.

But what's happened to this dinner, it's really important to understand this because

it's been around since the 1920s, but this is not the event that it was when I first

moved here over 30 years ago.

There are a handful of members of the permanent Washington elite who about 20 years ago decided

that the character and tenor of this dinner needed to change and that it needed to become

the East Coast's answer to the Oscars.

So it became this celebrity-studied weekend-long affair that completely polluted what had been

a fairly straightforward single-night event where the reporters got into the room with

the president and they all roasted each other.

Yes.

And now it's this weekend of excess that begins with lunch parties on the Saturday, stretches

out into after parties after the dinner, then the Sunday is filled with parties as well,

networks falling over themselves to get celebrities and prominent figures from whichever administration

is in power to sit at their respective tables, the same networks that are trimming their

news budgets, firing reporters, cutting back their international news operations.

It's just an appalling event and unfortunately last night, one that came under attack.

Simon, always good to talk to you.

Thanks so much for that.

Simon Marx, LBC's Washington correspondent.